Gingerbread Party

For some time I have wanted to hold a Gingerbread decorating event for local children,

...but if you know my shop you’ll know that it is really not of a size or layout that would work for lots of kiddies, icing, sweets and sticky fingers! Luckily for me I mentioned the idea to Jacquie of Jessie’s Kitchen and she immediately offered to host it. We both got very excited at the prospect and on Monday 30th November we held our first ever Gingerbread Party. This is the story of how it went…

I can’t claim to have come up with the idea of a party to decorate Gingerbread houses, a quick look online will show that it’s been popular in the US for some time. But it’s a brilliant concept – provide a group of children with undecorated gingerbread houses, lots of icing and bucket-loads of sweets and let their creativity take it from there. We had our venue, the gorgeous Jessie’s Kitchen, we made all of the gingerbread houses (and several dozen gingerbread men) in the Cake Guru kitchen and our local Booker store kindly donated all of the sweeties for decorating the houses. With the help of our local community support officer we contacted local schools and groups to tell them about our event and we left it to them to select the lucky children. Believe it or not it was harder than you might think to reach out to people and offer a completely free event, the first school we approached declined our offer…

Let the fun begin!

Happily we did get a wonderful group of children chosen by their schools to come along to our Gingerbread Party. Initially a few were quite reserved and quiet but there’s nothing quite like sweets and sticky icing to bring out the inner artistic architect and we soon had a room buzzing with excitement and creativity. Every Gingerbread house was different and not one of them was just a mass of sweets stuck-on randomly. Every child put a lot of thought into their decorations and there were several requests for specific colours of sweets to finish off particular design features.

I think the fantastic photographs speak for themselves and I must add a very big thank you to Robyn Stewart who stepped in as our photographer at the last minute. Sending a room full of happy children home with their beautifully decorated gingerbread houses (and a selection box from Jessie's Kitchen) really was the perfect start to our festive season.  Happy Christmas!!!